The use of computer workstations within educational and training systems used in schools, military, commercial, college and university settings have been viewed for a long time as a mechanism to improve the instruction that may be provided to students and trainees. In these settings, a teacher or instructor would benefit from the ability to observe the actions occurring on a student's workstation, to control the inputs, provided to a workstation, and to generate a sequence of multimedia data, including video and audio data, that is presented to the student on a workstation display device.
In the past, elaborate wired systems have been needed to be constructed to implement such a system. An example of such a prior system may be found within a commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 4,682,164. This system utilizes a large number of physical electrical connections that connect the individual workstations to a central control unit. Such systems require a large infrastructure consisting of these connections to be installed wherever the workstations are to be utilized. In addition, the workstations become difficult to move as the physical connections would need to be moved or changed when a workstation is moved.
Wireless communications networks are now beginning to permit computing systems such as the student workstations to become mobile. If such connections were used in educational settings, the student workstations would become mobile while reducing the infrastructure requirements in that the complex wiring systems of the prior art would not be needed. Wireless networks operate using a shared communications medium rather than a plurality of separate connections.
Once a plurality of workstations are connected using such a network, additional instructor services related to obtaining and maintaining attendance records, providing quiz and testing operations, and monitoring the status of student and trainee activities is desired. The operation of any such system that combines the functionality of prior art systems with wireless networks would need to address how these signals are transmitted over a shared communications connection. The present invention described herein addresses these limitations of the prior art to create such a wireless system for use in an educational setting.